1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for receiving a packet including data required to execute a predetermined command and executing the command.
2) Description of the Related Art
Serial advanced technology (AT) attachment (serial ATA) is coming into wide use as a storage interface standard for storage devices such as hard disk drives. In the serial ATA, when a hard disk drive is to execute a command issued from a host computer, the host computer and the hard disk drive perform data transmission/reception using packets referred to as frame information structure (FIS).
If an error occurs in the packet transmitted/received between the host computer and the hard disk drive, a retry is performed until transmission/reception of packets is complete without occurrence of an error as described in APT Technologies, Inc., Dell Computer Corporation, Intel Corporation, Maxtor Corporation, Seagate Technology, Serial ATA: High Speed Serialized AT Attachment, Revision 1. Oa, 7 Jan. 2003, 11.4 Transport error handling overview, pp. 276-279, [online] [retrieved on 2 Sep. 2003].
However, in the technology disclosed in the above-mentioned literature, the processing for the retry is executed irrespective of types of errors. Therefore, an error handling routine is stacked caused by the execution of the retry to make the error handling routine delayed in its execution.
In other words, even when receiving FIS having nothing to do with a command that is to be executed, the hard disk drive requests again transmission of a packet until the error is restored. Therefore, the error handling routine cannot quickly be executed.